Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Theory of Ice & Walrus

For those of you who have followed the mysterious Ms. E on A Theory of Ice and were wondering if she had put herself on an iceberg to float away into oblivion, be happy! She is writing again and she is doing so on a larger stage.

A choice passage:
"And that’s the beauty of the Big Game, because the laws of probability might allow for any number of feasible outcomes, but in the end, in this only universe, this best of all possible worlds, only one thing happens. It is the single greatest moment of existential freedom a player can face, a point where he ceases to be whatever he otherwise is, whatever he inevitably will be over the eighty games of a season or the 600 games of a career, and is nothing greater or lesser than what he can accomplish in sixty minutes."

Sports matter because they give us metaphors for life, miniaturized scenarios stripped down to the bare essentials. Half of life is la longue duree, the things we do repeatedly, our habits, our jobs, our homes, our families, the things and people and places that recur again and again. That is the part of life where we practice, and grow, and struggle, and eventually become what we are. But the other half is the singular chances, the days unlike any other, the moments. The interviews, the dates, the tests, the accidents — these are life’s elimination series. Those events are not less real or momentous because they don’t give us the time to show the true depths and dimensions of our character. When the Big Game happens in real life, we don’t call it unrepresentative, we just call it unfair. And it is.

Let's hope she sends her academic career into the Sin Bin and get on with the life she was made for.